Idris Elba meets his Waterloo – in Ghana

Director Cary Fukunaga on catching malaria, dangling Idris Elba off a cliff, and why his Netflix movie Beasts of No Nation could change history

There’s no such thing as a good time to contract malaria. But seven days before you’re due to start filming a movie you’ve been preparing for the last 10 years is unusually inconvenient.

This was the situation Cary Joji Fukunaga found himself in last summer when he was in Ghana, readying to shoot Beasts of No Nation, a war drama about a young orphan who’s conscripted into a regiment of child soldiers.

While they’d been scouting for filming locations, Fukunaga, his assistant and his driver had all been repeatedly bitten by the same mosquito during a cross-country Jeep ride: they were “consumed like an all-you-can-eat buffet”, is how he puts it. By the following weekend, all three could barely sit up.

Fukunaga’s previous film was an adaptation of Jane Eyre, in which the biggest challenge had been leaving the requisite 90 minutes between takes for Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbenderto change costumes. From his sweltering sick-bed in Accra, Thornfield Hall seemed a very long way away.

The production’s team of Lebanese fixers were dispatched to find quinine, and after a week of treatment, the 38-year-old American director was well enough to make it to the set. Ordinarily, that would be the nadir of any film shoot. On Beasts of No Nation, it was the canapés.

Idris Elba in Beasts of No NationCredit:
Handout

On day one, the Steadicam operator pulled his hamstring, so Fukunaga spent the next five weeks strapped into the camera rig himself, skittering around rocks and creepers, and at one point almost treading on a black mamba, a venomous snake whose bite can be fatal.

Then there was the time his lead actor, the Luther and Pacific Rim star Idris Elba, fell off a cliff. During a break in filming, Elba leaned on a tree by the edge of a waterfall, slipped, and went tumbling over the side: it was only by grabbing the branch of a tree that was growing on a thin outcrop a few feet down that he avoided a 90-foot drop onto the jagged rocks below.

Travelling between filming locations was also eventful. During one journey, the convoy was ambushed by bandits; they were eventually chased off by the production’s police escort, who fired shotguns at them from out of the car windows. And on the way to the final set – a beach miles from any surfaced road – the vehicles got stuck in a swamp, forcing the crew to carry their equipment through mud that came up to their shins.

Days after sets were built, they were washed away by the monsoon rains. Some of the locally cast extras were thrown in jail after being mistaken for mercenaries. Fukunaga contracted an intestinal parasite after eating a salad and lost one and a half stone.

“I mean, every day was a slog,” he says, his finely cut features screwed up into a grimace. “There was no ease anywhere. It was suffocatingly hot and humid to the point at which you feel like you’re constantly about to pass out.” But as he says all this – admittedly, from the vantage point of a beachside bar at the Venice Film Festival, where Beasts of No Nation is about to have its world premiere – it’s not with battle-weariness, but sharp-eyed, Labrador-ish intensity. “It was tough,” he continues. “But I wouldn’t have done it any other way.”

It would be easy to say that Beasts of No Nation was worth the trouble, but that would be selling both film and trouble short. It’s one of those films in which the madness of its making infects every frame – the whole thing feels like a malarial dream, sweat-soaked and hot with panic.

It’s also transfixingly tough, with scenes of murder, abuse and dismemberment, spelling out the brutality of a war zone childhood in eight-foot neon letters – although when I suggest it’s an important film, Fukunaga demurs. “I don’t want it to be one of those movies that people say is important,” he says. “To me, that’s like trying to hook someone up with your friend by saying they’re ‘really nice’. It immediately makes them less attractive.”

“I don’t want it to be one of those movies that people say is important. To me, that’s like trying to hook someone up with your friend by saying they’re ‘really nice’."

Perhaps unsurprisingly in light of the insanity detailed above, Beasts of No Nation is the first western film to have been shot in Ghana for 30 years: the last was Werner Herzog’s Cobra Verde, which was released in 1985. Even for Herzog, whose natural habitat is chaos, the production was “one of the worst I have ever experienced… You have to deviate from your normal way of doing things and try to understand the tempo of the continent. A strict Prussian military type would buckle in a matter of days.”

Originally, Fukunaga had planned to shoot in Kenya, at the request of the bond company who were underwriting the production. But the 2013 terrorist attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi made that impossible. Fukunaga was actually in Nairobi, location-scouting, when the four-day siege took place. “They just rang us up and said, ‘There’s no way in hell’,” he says. Ghana, with its widespread corruption, stifling climate and total absence of filmmaking infrastructure, became the more sensible option.

Beasts of No Nation - Main Trailer

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Moving the production across the continent became known as ‘Operation Black Star’, after the Ghanaian flag – and Elba, whose mother Eve was born in the country, became a key player. The actor rang some friends in high places (one was a nephew of the President) who could help arrange the promised tax breaks and, crucially, provide access to military vehicles and weapons that couldn’t be brought in as props.

“We needed to have those people on our side to convince the bond company that Ghana was the place to shoot,” says Fukunaga. “And Idris was instrumental in that.”

He also describes Elba’s “professionalism” on set as naturally “upping the game” of his mostly untrained cast: particularly 14-year-old Abraham Attah, a first-time actor who was chosen to play the lead role at an open audition, and who shares many gut-wrenching scenes with Elba’s character. Attah went on to win the Marcello Mastroianni Award at Venice for the most promising young actor or actress at the festival, so the magical substance that rubbed off on him – call it Elba grease – must have done the trick.

Fukunaga discovered the novel on which Beasts of No Nation is based while he was a student, and immediately began turning it into a script. But the release of a similarly themed child soldier film, Johnny Mad Dog, in 2008, spooked investors. So instead, he went to Mexico City, where he made a Spanish-language people-smuggling thriller, Sin Nombre – and then, two years later, to Derbyshire, where he shot Jane Eyre.

“I joke that the binding theme of my movies is that children die in all of them,” he says, before clarifying: “It’s not a very funny joke.”

He’d read Moira Buffini’s adaptation of the Charlotte Brontë novel and petitioned BBC Films to let him direct, selling them on his keen interest in all things 19th century (he earned a degree in history before going to film school). The fun of making a film is “living a different life”, he says, adding that he pleaded, unsuccessfully, to learn to ride horses with the cast. (BBC Films decided against it for insurance reasons, so he took private lessons.)

Fukunaga at work on the set of Beasts of No Nation

Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender were his first choices for the roles back then, and if he was making the film today instead, they still would be. He loved Fassbender’s “mischievous” edge as Rochester – “He was the second son in a time of primogeniture, a Prince Harry figure” – and also his “ugliness”, which wasn’t physical but subcutaneous, chewing him up on the inside.

Then came the HBO series True Detective: Fukunaga directed all eight episodes of the first season, for which he won an Emmy Award. He left the show amid reports of a feud with its famously intense writer Nick Pizzolatto, which gathered credibility when an arrogant Asian-American filmmaker character with a conspicuously Fukunaga-like ponytail popped up in the second season.

"On True Detective, Nick and I had a share in every element of decision-making. We had to come to an agreement on everything, which did slow down the process”

Fukunaga won’t say much about this, other than noting that his biggest obstacle while making the show was that he and Pizzolatto “had a share in every element of decision-making. So rather than me or him being the ‘auteur’, we had to come to an agreement on everything, which did slow down the process.”

And in that process, “ego can take precedence over actual, sensible reasons for doing things,” he continues. “Art has to be driven by ego, because you have to think you have something to say. But I also think great things come out of limitations and humility as well.”

On Beasts of No Nation, things were very different. “The writer [of the novel, Uzodinma Iweala] was a wonderful guy who never once tried to insert himself into the process. He had complete trust with how I was going to handle it, and if I had questions about his material I felt really comfortable asking him.”

Outside interference – the meddlesome human type, as opposed to the absurd cosmic mayhem that plagued the Beasts of No Nation shoot – certainly seems to be a bugbear. Shortly after completing his latest film, Fukunaga’s long-gestating, two-part adaptation of Stephen King’s It fell apart thanks to creative differences with the studio New Line, who took over the project from Warner Bros while Fukunaga was stumbling around the Ghanaian jungles in a Steadicam rig.

“It was a big change, and I didn’t know what it meant at the time until I got deeper in and started developing the screenplay,” he says: in short, New Line wanted a conventional horror film, while Fukunaga had grander plans. “I’ve been told I’m not allowed to comment on that any more,” he says, adding that his suddenly empty schedule isn’t necessarily bad news: “Frankly, I’m pretty happy to take some time off.”

He’ll also be keeping a close eye on what happens next. Beasts of No Nation is the first non-documentary feature to be produced by Netflix, which means after an exclusive week-long run in the Curzon group of independent cinemas, it will be posted on the video-on-demand platform, where subscribers can watch it at home, for free.

Depending on who you talk to, this will either save the cinema-going experience or destroy it. The major multiplex chains, including Odeon, Vue and Cineworld, are fiercely protective of the traditional three-month gap between a film’s cinema release and its appearance on other platforms, be that a video-on-demand service or DVD and Blu-ray.

But Netflix argues that without having to worry about sales figures for individual films – their customers pay a monthly subscription fee – they’re freer to invest in less obviously commercial work alongside, say, the four Adam Sandler films the company also currently has in production. (The ethos has already paid off in the television arm of Netflix’s business: Orange is the New Black, a niche-on-paper comic drama about a women’s prison, is their most watched series to date.)

This makes Beasts of No Nation an important test case, which Fukunaga is not entirely happy about. He says he’s worried that the film will be treated as a “Petri dish” rather than a movie, though he thinks Netflix’s willingness to shake up the system is “the epitome of indie”.

Fukunaga the history buff surfaces again. “Some of the best generals did things that were completely against the book,” he says. “Wellington at Waterloo; Nelson at Trafalgar. Playing by the rules gets you somewhere, but breaking them can change history.”

Beasts of No Nation will be released in UK cinemas on October 9, and on Netflix worldwide on October 16